The Pennsylvania Democratic debate starts at 00:00 UTC… just over 15 minutes from now. In the normal case, I would have left work a little early and run home to be sure I could watch it live. But no… ABC is delaying it for the West Coast. It will not be on until 03:00 UTC here. Hours after it happened. Which is just ridiculous for a news event. As several West Coast bloggers have commented, they are treating it like a “show” rather than as news. (Of course, I get pissed off at the 3 hour delay for shows too sometimes.)

This is ridiculous.

It really makes me want to drop a Slingbox in the house of a friend or relative in the Eastern time zone. Very very annoying.

(Yes, I know, they will probably get more viewers this way, but still…)

And for the next 3 hours and change I now have to avoid all my usual news feeds and sites to avoid spioilers. Spoilers for a DEBATE. Urg.

One last note on polls for today.

Pollster.com has poll numbers for seven of the remaining ten contents on the Democratic side.

Rounding slightly, from my previous calculations (I didn’t redo them today) Clinton needs to pick up about 58% of all remaining delegates (including super delegates) in order to win.

In each of the seven states with polls, I renormalized the numbers to be out of 100% (essentially redistributing “undecided” and “other” evenly between Clinton and Obama) and then looked at the margins.

If we approximate things by saying that the Clinton percentage of popular vote arrived at this way will approximate percentage of delegates… here is how things look as of today using pollster’s trendline numbers.

• Kentucky: Clinton 67%, Obama 33%
• West Virginia: Clinton 65%, Obama 35%
• Oregon: Clinton 60%, Obama 40%
• Puerto Rico: Clinton 57%, Obama 43%
• Indiana: Clinton 55%, Obama 45%
• Pennsylvania: Clinton 53%, Obama 47%
• North Carolina: Obama 60%, Clinton 40%

Now, looking here there are actually 3, maybe 4 states where Clinton is winning by big enough margins to be on pace to win if those votes were held right now. (In reality, the 58% or so she needs will change with the results of each state.) That is pretty strong.

More to the point, Obama is only clearly actually AHEAD in *one* state.

Basically Clinton’s path to the nomination is this… screw the current delegate count… win 8 or 9 out of 10 of the remaining votes. In aggregate, through this she will NOT be on the “winning pace”. Once all the votes are counted, she will probably need 65% or so of the remaining unpledged superdelegates to vote for her in order to win. Looking the other way, this means Obama only needs 35% of them to take the win. 35% is not a big number, surely Obama would be able to convince 35% of the remaining superdelegates.

But she will argue that she has the momentum, she is on a roll. She has won X number in a row. She will argue that the fact she is still behind is irrelevant. She may be able to find some combinations of counts that show her ahead in the popular vote. (Although there is no real popular vote count, as in many caucus states they only ever counted delegates won, and actual original votes were never counted.) And then she will say that because of this she deserves to win.

In the mean time, she will continue throwing the kitchen sink at Obama, and hoping that he stumbles and falls more. She wants to make him look weak and damaged coming out of this process. Then she continues to argue that because of that he can’t win. And that the Democrats have to pick her if they want to stand a chance. That picking Obama would be political suicide.

Will that manage to convince 65% of the remaining superdelegates? Will Obama be able to convince 35% or so to stick with him?

I don’t know.

The numbers are clear. She is badly behind. She should not be able to win.

But she does have a path to victory.

And there are ways I could see it play out that would result in her actually getting the nomination in the end.

I still think it is unlikely. But it is not impossible.

But to do it she will end up inflicting massive amounts of damage.

Very depressing.

The pollster.com trend lines in PA are more than 5% apart again based on new polls today which are all post-“bitterflap”. One week left to see how it all plays out in the end.

For the first time today in Pollster.com’s trendline of multiple polls, Clinton’s lead in Pennsylvania is under 5%. Of course, there is only one poll so far that includes some data after the blow up about Obama’s “bitter” comments. And that one poll shows Clinton with a 20 point lead. But the trend line, at least for now, has dropped to below 5%.

We’ll see if it stays that way after more new polls come in. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

But I guess we shall see.